Apple Inc.
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Apple Inc. is an American multinational technology company headquartered in Cupertino, California. Founded on April 1, 1976 by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple designs and sells consumer electronics, software, and services, including the iPhone, Mac, iPad, Apple Watch, AirPods, and Vision Pro. It is the world's most valuable company by market capitalization, surpassing $4 trillion on October 29, 2025, and reported $391.0 billion in net sales for fiscal year 2024.
In artificial intelligence, Apple develops the Apple Intelligence personal intelligence system, the Apple Foundation Models (AFM) family of language models, the open-source MLX framework for machine learning on Apple Silicon, and the Core ML developer framework. The company's AI work is led by John Giannandrea, Senior Vice President of Machine Learning and AI Strategy, and emphasizes on-device processing combined with a custom server tier called Private Cloud Compute.
| Field | Detail |
|---|---|
| Founded | April 1, 1976 |
| Founders | Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Ronald Wayne |
| Headquarters | Apple Park, Cupertino, California, United States |
| CEO | Tim Cook (since August 24, 2011; succession to John Ternus announced for September 1, 2026) |
| Chairman | Arthur D. Levinson |
| CFO | Kevan Parekh (since January 1, 2025) |
| SVP, Machine Learning and AI Strategy | John Giannandrea |
| SVP, Software Engineering | Craig Federighi |
| SVP, Hardware Technologies | Johny Srouji |
| SVP, Hardware Engineering | John Ternus |
| SVP, Services | Eddy Cue |
| COO | Jeff Williams (until 2025); Sabih Khan (from August 2025) |
| Products | iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, AirPods, Apple Vision Pro, Apple TV, HomePod |
| Services | App Store, iCloud, Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Pay, Apple Card, Apple Arcade, AppleCare |
| Employees | ~164,000 full-time worldwide (FY2024) |
| Revenue | $391.0 billion (FY2024) |
| Net income | $93.7 billion (FY2024) |
| Market capitalization | Over $4 trillion (October 29, 2025) |
| Stock symbol | AAPL (NASDAQ) |
| Website | apple.com |
Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne founded Apple Computer Company on April 1, 1976 to sell the Apple I, a hand-built personal computer designed by Wozniak. To finance production, Jobs sold his Volkswagen van and Wozniak sold his HP-65 calculator, raising about $1,300. Wozniak first demonstrated a prototype at the Homebrew Computer Club in Palo Alto in July 1976, and the machine was offered at $666.66.
Wayne sold his 10 percent share back to Jobs and Wozniak for $800 just twelve days after the founding. The company was incorporated as Apple Computer, Inc. on January 3, 1977, in Cupertino, with $250,000 in funding from former Intel marketing manager Mike Markkula. The Apple II, also designed largely by Wozniak, launched in 1977 and became one of the first mass-market personal computers, supported later by the VisiCalc spreadsheet.
Apple held its initial public offering on December 12, 1980 at $22 per share on NASDAQ under the symbol AAPL. The offering was the largest U.S. IPO since Ford Motor Company in 1956 and made about 300 employees instant millionaires. The company released the Lisa in 1983 and the original Macintosh on January 24, 1984, the latter announced with the famous "1984" Super Bowl commercial directed by Ridley Scott.
Following a power struggle with CEO John Sculley over Macintosh strategy, Steve Jobs resigned from Apple on September 17, 1985 and founded the workstation company NeXT. Several senior Apple engineers left with him. Through the late 1980s and early 1990s, Apple expanded the Macintosh line, launched the Newton MessagePad in 1993, and licensed the Mac OS to clone makers, but the company suffered declining margins and management turmoil under Sculley, Michael Spindler, and Gil Amelio.
Apple agreed to acquire NeXT in December 1996 for about $400 million, bringing Steve Jobs back to the company. Jobs became interim CEO in September 1997 and permanent CEO in 2000. He cut product lines, killed the Newton, ended Mac cloning, and accepted a $150 million investment from Microsoft.
Apple introduced the iMac in 1998 and Mac OS X (built on NeXTSTEP technology) in 2001. On October 23, 2001, Jobs unveiled the iPod, a hard-drive music player priced at $399 with a five-gigabyte capacity that could hold "1,000 songs in your pocket." The iTunes Store opened in 2003, and the company dropped "Computer" from its name in 2007 as it expanded beyond computers.
Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone at Macworld on January 9, 2007, and the device went on sale on June 29, 2007. The first iPhone combined a multi-touch capacitive screen, a mobile web browser, and a phone in a single package. The App Store launched alongside iPhone OS 2.0 in July 2008, creating what would become a multibillion-dollar developer economy.
Apple acquired the Siri voice assistant in April 2010, after the company's app launched in February 2010. The iPad debuted on April 3, 2010. Siri shipped on the iPhone 4S on October 14, 2011 as the first widely deployed mainstream virtual assistant. Steve Jobs resigned as CEO on August 24, 2011 due to declining health and recommended that the board name Tim Cook, then chief operating officer, as his successor. Jobs died on October 5, 2011.
Under Cook, Apple introduced the Apple Watch in 2014 and AirPods in 2016. The company moved into its new circular headquarters Apple Park in Cupertino in April 2017, designed by Norman Foster on a 175-acre site that houses more than 12,000 employees in a single four-story ring building.
Apple became the first U.S. public company to reach a $1 trillion market capitalization in August 2018, $2 trillion in August 2020, $3 trillion intraday in January 2022, and $4 trillion on October 29, 2025. The company introduced the Apple Vision Pro mixed reality headset in February 2024 at $3,499. On April 20, 2026, Apple announced that Tim Cook would become executive chairman and that hardware engineering chief John Ternus would become CEO on September 1, 2026.
| Product line | First introduced | Description |
|---|---|---|
| Mac | 1984 | Personal computers running macOS, including MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, iMac, Mac mini, Mac Studio, and Mac Pro |
| iPhone | 2007 | Smartphone running iOS; Apple's largest revenue category |
| iPad | 2010 | Tablet running iPadOS, with Pro, Air, mini, and base models |
| Apple Watch | 2015 | Smartwatch running watchOS; introduced September 2014, sold from April 2015 |
| AirPods | 2016 | Wireless earbuds; lines include AirPods, AirPods Pro, and AirPods Max |
| HomePod | 2018 | Smart speaker, current models are HomePod (second generation) and HomePod mini |
| Apple TV | 2007 | Streaming media player running tvOS |
| Apple Vision Pro | 2024 | Mixed reality headset running visionOS, released February 2, 2024 |
Apple's services segment, the company's fastest-growing business, generated $96.2 billion in fiscal 2024, up 13 percent year over year. Major services include the App Store, iCloud, Apple Music (launched 2015), Apple TV+ (launched November 2019), Apple Arcade (2019), Apple News+ (2019), Apple Card (2019), Apple Pay, Apple One subscription bundle (2020), and AppleCare extended warranty.
Apple began designing its own ARM-based application processors after acquiring P.A. Semi in 2008. The A-series chips power iPhone, iPad, and Apple TV; the M-series chips power Mac and iPad Pro. Apple announced the transition of Mac from Intel to its own silicon at WWDC 2020 and completed the move with the Mac Pro M2 Ultra in June 2023.
| Chip | Released | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| M1 | November 2020 | First Apple Silicon Mac chip; debuted in MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13, and Mac mini |
| M1 Pro / M1 Max | October 2021 | Higher-performance variants for MacBook Pro 14 and 16 |
| M1 Ultra | March 2022 | Two M1 Max dies fused via UltraFusion interconnect, used in Mac Studio |
| M2 | June 2022 | Second generation, debuted in MacBook Air |
| M2 Pro / M2 Max | January 2023 | Higher-end variants in MacBook Pro and Mac mini |
| M2 Ultra | June 2023 | Used in Mac Pro and Mac Studio, completed Intel-to-ARM transition |
| M3 / M3 Pro / M3 Max | October 2023 | First chip family using TSMC 3 nm process |
| M4 | May 2024 | Debuted in iPad Pro before Mac, includes Neural Engine for Apple Intelligence |
| M4 Pro / M4 Max | October 2024 | Variants for MacBook Pro and Mac mini |
| M5 | October 2025 | Adds dedicated Neural Accelerators inside each GPU core, 153 GB/s memory bandwidth |
The Apple A11 Bionic, announced on September 12, 2017 with the iPhone 8 and iPhone X, was the first Apple chip to ship a dedicated Neural Engine, a two-core block performing up to 600 billion operations per second. Subsequent A-series chips have steadily expanded Neural Engine throughput, reaching a 16-core unit in the A17 Pro, A18, A18 Pro, and the M-series chips. The Neural Engine accelerates Face ID, Animoji, computational photography, on-device dictation, and the on-device portion of Apple Intelligence.
| Chip | Year | Neural Engine |
|---|---|---|
| A11 Bionic | 2017 | First Neural Engine, 2 cores, 600 billion operations per second |
| A12 Bionic | 2018 | 8-core Neural Engine, 5 trillion operations per second |
| A13 Bionic | 2019 | 8-core Neural Engine |
| A14 Bionic | 2020 | 16-core Neural Engine, 11 trillion operations per second |
| A15 Bionic | 2021 | 16-core Neural Engine, 15.8 trillion operations per second |
| A16 Bionic | 2022 | 16-core Neural Engine, 17 trillion operations per second |
| A17 Pro | 2023 | 16-core Neural Engine, 35 trillion operations per second; first 3 nm A-series chip |
| A18 / A18 Pro | 2024 | Updated 16-core Neural Engine, supports Apple Intelligence |
Apple has worked on machine learning since the early days of Siri and the Newton's handwriting recognition, but the modern AI organization dates to the hire of John Giannandrea in April 2018 and the launch of Apple Intelligence at WWDC 2024. Apple's strategy emphasizes on-device computation, a privacy-preserving server tier called Private Cloud Compute, and the open-source MLX framework for research and developer use on Apple Silicon.
Siri originated as a spinoff from SRI International's CALO (Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes) project. Siri Inc. launched a free iOS app on February 4, 2010, and Apple acquired the company in April 2010 for a reported $200 million. The integrated Siri assistant launched on the iPhone 4S on October 14, 2011 as the headline feature of the new device.
Apple has since folded Siri into the SVP of Machine Learning and AI Strategy organization. The 2024 Apple Intelligence announcement described a rebuilt Siri with deeper system integration, on-screen awareness, and the ability to take in-app actions, although the most personalized version of these features was delayed multiple times in 2025.
Apple hired John Giannandrea from Google on April 3, 2018, where he had led the Machine Intelligence, Research and Search teams. Apple promoted him to the executive team in December 2018 as Senior Vice President of Machine Learning and AI Strategy, reporting directly to Tim Cook. Giannandrea oversees Siri, Core ML, the Apple Foundation Models team, and machine learning research. In 2025, after the personalized Siri delays, Apple reorganized parts of the Siri team and brought in Vision Pro chief Mike Rockwell to drive a rebuilt assistant.
Apple Intelligence is the umbrella brand for the company's generative AI features, announced at the WWDC 2024 keynote on June 10, 2024. Initial features include system-wide Writing Tools (rewrite, proofread, summarize), notification summaries, smart Reply suggestions in Mail and Messages, Genmoji custom emoji generation, the Image Playground app, Visual Intelligence (camera search powered by visual look-up plus optional ChatGPT and Google search), and a redesigned Siri experience.
Apple Intelligence requires a device with at least 8 GB of unified memory: iPhone 15 Pro and later, M-series iPads, and M-series Macs. The first features shipped on October 28, 2024 with iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1. Genmoji, Image Playground, and ChatGPT integration arrived in iOS 18.2 on December 11, 2024. Support for French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil), Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese (simplified), Vietnamese, and localized English for India and Singapore arrived with iOS 18.4 on March 31, 2025, alongside the first availability of Apple Intelligence in the European Union and on Apple Vision Pro.
Apple Foundation Models (AFM) are the language models that power Apple Intelligence. Apple published the technical paper "Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models" on July 29, 2024 (arXiv 2407.21075), describing a roughly 3 billion parameter on-device model and a larger server model. The on-device model uses architectural choices including grouped-query attention, KV-cache sharing, and 2-bit quantization-aware training, and runs locally on Apple Silicon with the Neural Engine.
In the 2025 update published with WWDC 2025, Apple introduced a Parallel-Track Mixture-of-Experts (PT-MoE) transformer for the server model, combining track parallelism, sparse expert computation, and interleaved global and local attention. Apple's reported evaluations show the on-device AFM outperforming Phi-3-mini, Mistral 7B, Gemma 7B, and Llama 3 8B on a benchmark suite of human-rated tasks, and the server AFM compared favorably to DBRX-Instruct, Mixtral 8x22B, GPT-3.5, and Llama 3 70B.
At WWDC 2025 on June 9, 2025, Apple opened the on-device Foundation Models to third-party developers through the Foundation Models framework. The Swift API supports guided generation (returning structured types defined in code), tool calling, and streaming, with on-device inference at no cost to the developer or user. The framework entered beta on June 9, 2025 with the developer betas of iOS 26 and macOS 26, and reached general availability with the public release of those operating systems in September 2025.
Private Cloud Compute (PCC) is Apple's server tier for Apple Intelligence requests that exceed the on-device model's capabilities. Each PCC node is built from Apple Silicon servers running a hardened operating system designed exclusively for inference. Apple published the PCC Security Guide and made the production binary images, software stack, and a Virtual Research Environment available for outside researchers. Key properties include verifiable software (every released image is publicly logged so a device can refuse to send data to any node it cannot attest to), non-targetability (requests are routed in ways that prevent Apple from singling out a user), and stateless processing (no user data is retained after the response is returned).
MLX is an open-source array framework developed by Apple's machine learning research group, released on GitHub on December 5, 2023 under the MIT License. MLX is designed for ML on Apple Silicon and uses unified memory so arrays can move between CPU and GPU without explicit copies. It exposes a NumPy-like Python API and Swift, C++, and C bindings, and provides higher-level packages including mlx.nn for neural networks and mlx.optimizers. Apple maintains the companion mlx-examples repository with reference implementations for transformer language models, LoRA fine-tuning, Stable Diffusion, and Whisper.
Core ML is Apple's on-device inference framework, introduced at WWDC 2017. It runs models on the CPU, GPU, or Neural Engine and supports models converted from PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, and other frameworks via the Core ML Tools Python package. Create ML is a companion macOS app for training Core ML models for image, sound, text, action, and tabular data without writing model code. Apple also provides domain APIs including the Vision framework (image and video analysis), the Speech framework (recognition and synthesis), the Natural Language framework, and Sound Analysis.
| Paper | Date | Topic |
|---|---|---|
| Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models (arXiv 2407.21075) | July 29, 2024 | Architecture and training of the on-device 3B AFM and the server AFM |
| Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models, Tech Report 2025 (arXiv 2507.13575) | July 2025 | Updated AFM models with PT-MoE server architecture |
| OpenELM (arXiv 2404.14619) | April 24, 2024 | Open language model family at 270M, 450M, 1.1B, and 3B parameters with full training framework released |
| DataComp-LM and DCLM-Baseline-7B (arXiv 2406.11794) | June 17, 2024 | Open dataset benchmark and 7B model trained on 2.5T tokens |
| MM1 (arXiv 2403.09611) | March 14, 2024 | Multimodal LLM up to 30B parameters with dense and Mixture-of-Experts variants, ECCV 2024 |
| MM1.5 (arXiv 2409.20566) | September 30, 2024 | Multimodal LLM family with text-rich image understanding, video, and UI variants |
| Ferret (ICLR 2024 Spotlight) | October 2023 | Multimodal model for referring and grounding any region in an image |
| Ferret-UI (arXiv 2404.05719) | April 8, 2024 | Multimodal model for understanding mobile user interfaces |
| Private Cloud Compute Security Guide | June 2024 | Architecture of Apple's confidential AI cloud |
Apple announced a partnership with OpenAI at WWDC 2024 on June 10, 2024 to bring ChatGPT into Siri, Writing Tools, and Visual Intelligence. The integration shipped with iOS 18.2 in December 2024. When Siri determines that a question is better answered by ChatGPT, the user is asked for permission before any data is sent. Requests use OpenAI's GPT-4o model and are not stored by OpenAI; user IP addresses are obscured. ChatGPT use is free without an account, and users with paid OpenAI accounts can sign in to access premium features.
Apple Intelligence requests are first sent to the on-device AFM, which handles the majority of personal-context tasks (summarization, rewriting, simple reasoning, in-app actions). Requests that exceed the on-device model's capacity are sent to Private Cloud Compute, where a larger AFM running on Apple Silicon servers responds without retaining user data. ChatGPT use is opt-in for tasks that benefit from a general-knowledge LLM. This staged design is Apple's response to a competitive landscape dominated by cloud-only assistants from Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI.
Apple frames its AI work as compatible with its long-standing privacy positioning. On-device computation means inputs and outputs never leave the device for many features. Private Cloud Compute extends Secure Enclave guarantees to the server tier and publishes binary images for outside audit. Differential privacy and federated learning techniques are used in features such as QuickType keyboard and Siri training, and Apple has published research on private learning since 2017.
Apple has made hundreds of acquisitions over its history, with a sustained focus on AI and machine learning startups since 2016. Apple acquired more AI companies than any other technology firm between 2016 and 2020.
| Year | Company | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1996 | NeXT | Approximately $400 million; brought Steve Jobs back and provided the foundation of Mac OS X |
| 2002 | Emagic | Audio software, became Logic Pro |
| 2008 | P.A. Semi | $278 million; chip design team behind A-series and M-series Apple Silicon |
| 2010 | Siri | About $200 million; voice assistant launched on iPhone 4S |
| 2010 | Intrinsity | Low-power chip design |
| 2012 | AuthenTec | $356 million; fingerprint sensor technology that became Touch ID |
| 2014 | Beats Electronics | $3 billion, Apple's largest acquisition; included Beats headphones and Beats Music streaming |
| 2017 | Workflow | Automation app that became Shortcuts |
| 2018 | Shazam | About $400 million; music identification |
| 2018 | Texture | Magazine app that became Apple News+ |
| 2019 | Drive.ai | Self-driving car startup |
| 2019 | Intel smartphone modem business | $1 billion; cellular modem patents and engineers |
| 2020 | Voysis | Irish voice AI startup, applied to Siri natural language |
| 2020 | Xnor.ai | About $200 million; on-device, low-power computer vision |
| 2020 | NextVR | Virtual reality content |
| 2021 | Primephonic | Classical music streaming, became Apple Music Classical |
| 2024 | DataKalab | Paris-based startup focused on neural network compression for on-device inference |
Apple's fiscal year ends in late September. For fiscal year 2024 (ended September 28, 2024), Apple reported $391.0 billion in net sales, a 2 percent increase from $383.3 billion in fiscal 2023, and net income of $93.7 billion. iPhone revenue was $201.2 billion (about 51 percent of total sales), the Services segment grew 13 percent to $96.2 billion, and revenue in Greater China declined 8 percent to about $66.9 billion. The company returned $110 billion to shareholders through dividends and buybacks during the fiscal year.
Apple was the first U.S. company to reach a closing market capitalization of $1 trillion (August 2, 2018), $2 trillion (August 19, 2020), and $3 trillion intraday (January 3, 2022; first close above the level on June 30, 2023). Apple closed above $4 trillion for the first time on October 29, 2025, joining Nvidia and Microsoft at that level.
Apple Park, the company's headquarters at One Apple Park Way in Cupertino, opened to employees in April 2017. The 2.8-million-square-foot main building is a four-story circular ring designed by Foster + Partners with Steve Jobs as a primary client. The campus includes the 1,000-seat Steve Jobs Theater, a fitness center, a visitor center, and a 100,000-square-foot research and development building. About 80 percent of the 175-acre site is green space planted with drought-resistant native species. Apple also operates the original 1 Infinite Loop campus nearby and engineering offices in Austin, San Diego, Seattle, Cambridge, Beijing, and Munich, among other locations.
Apple is known for secrecy around unreleased products, a focus on hardware and software integration, and a small leadership team (the executive team page on apple.com lists about a dozen members). Lisa Jackson, former EPA administrator, leads environment, policy, and social initiatives. Sustainability efforts include carbon neutrality for Apple's corporate operations since 2020 and a target of carbon neutrality across the entire product lifecycle by 2030.
Apple has faced sustained antitrust scrutiny over its 30 percent commission on App Store transactions and the requirement that iOS apps use Apple's in-app purchase system. Epic Games filed suit in 2020 and won a partial injunction requiring Apple to permit developers to link to outside payment options. The Supreme Court declined further review in January 2024. In April 2025, Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers found Apple in willful contempt of her injunction, barred Apple from collecting commissions on out-of-app purchases, and referred Apple executives to the U.S. Attorney for possible criminal contempt proceedings. The Ninth Circuit denied Apple's emergency stay request on June 4, 2025.
In the European Union, the Digital Markets Act (which entered into force in 2024) requires Apple to allow alternative app stores, sideloading, and third-party browser engines on iOS in the EU. The European Commission fined Apple 1.8 billion euros in March 2024 over music streaming app rules and an additional 500 million euros in April 2025 for non-compliance with the DMA's anti-steering provisions. The U.S. Department of Justice filed a separate civil antitrust case in March 2024 alleging that Apple monopolizes the smartphone market.
Apple's reliance on Chinese manufacturing, particularly through Foxconn, has drawn criticism over labor conditions, including reports of long hours, suicides at Foxconn's Longhua plant in 2010, and protests at Zhengzhou in late 2022. The China region accounted for 17 percent of fiscal 2024 revenue. Apple has begun to diversify production into Vietnam and India for some product lines, though most iPhones are still assembled in China.
The "more personalized Siri" features announced at WWDC 2024 (personal context awareness, in-app actions, and on-screen awareness) were delayed in March 2025 to an unspecified future release. Apple removed a 2024 advertisement that demonstrated the feature, and Bloomberg reported that Apple's senior director overseeing Siri called the delay "ugly and embarrassing" in an internal meeting. Apple targeted spring 2026 for the rollout. Critics including former Apple executives have argued that the company was slow to prioritize generative AI compared to Google and OpenAI.
Apple has faced criticism over its corporate tax arrangements in Ireland (the European Commission ordered Apple to pay 13 billion euros in back taxes in 2016, an order ultimately upheld by the European Court of Justice in September 2024), retail-store unionization efforts (the first U.S. Apple Store voted to unionize in Towson, Maryland in June 2022), and right-to-repair restrictions on iPhones.